Wilco’s Third Airline Pack Released

The third Airlines pack for Embraer Regional Jets is now available. It features 13 new real-world airlines liveries to improve the ERJ135 and ERJ145 series for both Microsoft Flight Simulator X and 2004.

The addon texturees are created by Mcphat Studios:

With a 'out of the box', stock 90+ pixel per meter ratio, which is one of the highest ratios, you can expext textures as sharp as they can be, without being HD. This combined with our signature style, our highly acclaimed textures and our devotion to bring you the best, you may expect what you have come accustomed to from us : Textures that bring your add-on to the next level.

RealAir Beech Duke B60 1.5 Update

You can now download the Version 1.5 Update of our Beech Duke. This update adds a number of new features to the Duke, resolves a few minor issues, and gives a slight performance improvement on most systems. The major changes are as follows:

Optimised LOD (Level Of Detail) models.

Optional medium and low polygon exterior models.

Optional mip-mapped textures.

Animated rain-drops on the windscreen glass.

Improved GPS HSI integration (using Reality-XP or default GPS).

HSI Auto or Manual DTK.

Improved ‘Cold and Dark’ function.

Improved engine starting.

More realistic generator gauges.

VATSIM Apres Ski Triangle Event

VATSIM have released details of their Apres Ski Triangle online event due to take place on the 30th January, 2010.

As the northern parts of Germany this year eperienced something like a real winter with a lot of snow and low temperatures VATSIM Germany wants to celebrate this by adopting a custom with a long tradition in the Alps and therefore invites the community to the Après-Ski-Triangle on Saturday January 30th 2010 18-22 UTC.

This update also includes all of the older SP1 updates. For this reason the Duke SP1 Update is no longer available.

X-Plane comes to the Palm Pre

X-Plane for is the most powerful, flexible, and realistic flight simulator in the world for desktop and portable personal computers. It is the gold standard for accurate flight simulation, offering realism that is unmatched by any other simulator. To get the flight-modeling accuracy that leaves all the other simulators behind, X-Plane uses blade element theory to predict the airflow over each bit of the airplane, determining the forces that will act on each bit of the plane, adding them all up, and using that huge amount of information to predict what the plane will do next... about 30 times per second! THIS is how X-Plane has the most powerful and accurate flight model available for personal computers. The flight model is so accurate, in fact, that X-Plane has earned FAA certification for pilots to log flight time towards actual pilot ratings (when used with the appropriate hardware), and is used by many aircraft companies to predict how their next-generation aircraft will fly. As in the full desktop version, X-Plane for Palm lets you experiment with different times of day, weather, sky conditions, wind, turbulence, weights, aircraft configurations and centers of gravity, all while flying multiple different aircraft though many different scenery locales from the stunning terrain topography of Innsbruck, Austria, (home to some of the most challenging mountains and topography for aviation) to the deserts of the American southwest. Fly the popular Cessna 172, the sleek Columbia-400, the speedy Piper Malibu, the revolutionary Cirrus VISION very light jet, the stunning and efficient 350-mile-per-hour Piaggio Avantu, the stout and strong King-Air, or the fascinating little Eclipse-500. Fly in various weather and times of day over Austria, Hawaii, Alaska, Desert Sky in the American south-west, San-Francisco, or the hotbed of general aviation in Southern California.

How far it has come...

Mark Stewart:

This is a review I wrote for flightsim.com in 1997, just over 10 years ago. Take a look at it and make sure to click for the expanded views of the screen shots to see the incredible graphics. Graphics that were so good not everyone could run it.

He also has a pretty good tutorial on using autopilot in X-Plane and several other tutorials.

Nice demos, easy to understand. very well done. I'm going to post these in the forums too.

PS, Here is that video Mark mentioned that goes more in depth...

Nice FS Blog

Now, I know we usually don't do these sort of plugs and stuff. But I checked out the website and I enjoyed it, plus I saw some stuff on there I had never seen before - That is what is important to me, his message:

I just like to let you know about a blog that I write for called Fsim: